


And ah! bright wings.

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Contentment, Gen, Happy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 05:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3369995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tiny little slip of romanticism. </p><p>I LIKE giving the boys happiness. And I'm too blasted busy for plot lately. I mean--it's GOOD to be a bit over employed at the moment. It makes up for years of underemployment. But it does mean that I'm busier with other people's plots than with my own. So this is just a plot-free slice of Mystradian gingerbread with lemon curd and butter frosting: comfort food, to the max.</p><p>The title is a quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "God's Grandeur." Look it up. It's a lovely thing....</p>
            </blockquote>





	And ah! bright wings.

 

The two men stand out on the balcony of Mycroft’s Pall Mall flat watching evening come to the avenue below. Mycroft holds  a snifter of brandy; Lestrade a bottle of Newcastle Nut Brown Ale.

They’ve said very little this past hour. Lestrade could talk more…probably would with a different partner. Still, he doesn’t need to talk, and Mycroft needs silence like desert flowers need rain. He can see the younger man revive as an evening winds along, quiet and still. Even more, he can see Mycroft turn brittle and hollow and delicate with too much social stress: a fragile glass ornament as paper-thin as the most expensive blown glass—like a light bulb or the decorations on a Christmas tree. In the end Mycroft becomes a walking miracle—held together not by tensile strength but pure will power.

When Lestrade needs to talk he does. When he doesn’t, though…so small and simple a gift to give his lover. How could he not hold silent for him?

The sky’s turned a dull, bruise-purple tone as the sun goes down behind heavy cloud. The city lights reflect dull orange off the clouds, setting up uneasy color pairings.

Mycroft’s eyes aren’t looking up, but down, watching the pedestrians walking below.

“Academic, tenured, second marriage, no children.”

“The fellow in the tweed suit?”

“Good heavens, no,” Mycroft clucks, fretfully. “He’s a retired greengrocer who plays chess at the Diogenes twice a week. No—the tall blonde woman in the Burberry with the rather overwrought umbrella printed with Notre Dame’s rose window.”

Lestrade locates her, the jewel tones of her brolly making her easy to sight once he knows what to look for. “Happy second marriage?” he asked, more to keep Mycroft talking than because he cared. Nor is he amazed. He’s known the Holmes Boys for over a decade by now, and he’s long since accepted their brilliance. It fascinates him. He’s often envious of it. He relies on them for that genius….but it’s not why he loves either brother.

He does love them. He loves both brothers quite dearly, though in distinctly different ways. Sometimes he wishes he were Sherlock—that barking, belling, bloodhound ability to track the prey over field and under fence and straight through every hedgerow and ditch that stands between him and his quarry. Lestrade’s the steady hunt master—but, oh, can the master ever envy the wild-baying freedom of the hound, even as he calls the pack in and whips them away from the prey.

He’s stood at the windows of Sherlock’s flat in Baker Street much as he stands on Mycroft’s balcony. He’s cradled beer bottles and tea cups and mugs of coffee in his hands and watched the passers-by as Sherlock calls out diagnoses, just as Mycroft is doing. They’ve spent quiet evenings together—though seldom half so quiet as evenings with Mycroft can be, because Sherlock loves an audience more than he knows, and will turn himself inside out to keep Lestrade’s attention.

Lestrade has told Mycroft, and only Mycroft, a deep secret about that.

“Sometimes I pretend to be bored just to see how hard he’ll work to get my attention,” he told the older brother. “Once I even pretended to be falling asleep when he tried to put me through one of his little pouty rounds of fake silence.”

Mycroft had snorted…delicately, but a snort in spite of that. “Horrors. You do know that the less he speaks the more you and that poor doctor of his are supposed to beg?”

Lestrade chuckled—a sweet, low, wicked chuckle, and winked at Mycroft, who’d smiled back in delicate, sly laughter.

If Sherlock was the hound on the hunt, Mycroft was ever and always the prey in the covert. Sometimes he reminded Lestrade of a delicate little quail, scuttling in the stubble after the harvest. Sometimes the noble pheasant with his elegant streamer of a tail. Most often, though, Mycroft was a fox—dapper and neat and shy and bold and brilliant, but always aware of the dogs and the pack. Always aware of the farmer and the shotgun. The fox seemed fittest for him—fox or ferret or a bold little wildcat from out of the highlands. Something that partook of the nature of both predator and prey.

It was that, Lestrade thought, that hooked into his soul and would not let him go. Bold and shy. Hunter and hunted. Dangerous and forever endangered. Mycroft lived in perfect comfort in both roles…and every time Lestrade saw the interplay it tugged something in his heart, and something a good deal more primordial and passionate.

A sidewise glance, a wild-fox smile from Mycroft could enchant his soul and set his libido stamping out flamenco rhythms and planning out a line of approach. Then Mycroft’s eyes would glow, still laughing, and his chin would rise, and soon they were engaged in their own familiar, quiet courtship. A smile. A touch…

They were good together, Lestrade thought. They suited each other. Between them they managed to do well what he’d only managed terribly with his former wife: the bifocal relationship that was as intimate as shared breath, but with boundaries as solid as walls of quarried, clean-cut stone. They read each other well, too, though he has to lay full credit for that on Mycroft’s elegant shoulders. His lover’s brilliance at observation is put to good use—as is his capacity for diplomatic interrogation and discovery. More, though, his shy, sly, retiring fox of a lover dares to be bold for Lestrade.

It’s that boldness—courage wrapped in a swan’s-down cloak of shy reserve—that most destroys Lestrade in the end. When a man skilled in retreat and illusion stands firm and sets all his masks aside and dares long for you?

“God,” Lestrade breathes in Mycroft’s ear that evening, curled beside his lover on the sofa. “God…”

Mycroft murmurs something quiet and inchoherent, and between them they shift and touch and move until they hover, poised, one step closer in their slow, choreographed erotic t’ai chi.

Mycroft’s skin is smooth, and cool. Lestrade has kissed Mycroft’s face in the rain, when water dripped down over cold cheeks, tasting of stone and sky and the faintest traces of hair gel. His body is firm for his age and profession, but not so firm as to have no soft, full curves to press into and caress. His greatest beauty, though, is his responsiveness. Lestrade loves to feel his own kisses come back to him as sighs and shivers and breathless longing.

Lestrade has read of sequential universes, and of the boast that there is no universe in which one character does not love another. He is not convinced. He can imagine a million universes, in most of which he and Mycroft never live—or never meet—or hate each other on first sight—or meet and work in peace, but never fall in love. He’s willing to believe that only a handful of universes hold the two of them as lovers, and only this one in which they are so content.

That is fine, with him. So long as there is one—his one—he is satisfied. And because he has found this one—his very own one world—he would never want to be anywhere else.

 


End file.
